Gaming everywhere

Материал готовится, пожалуйста, возвращайтесь позднее

Good news: as TechCrunch wrote our big brother SCVNGR recently has rised $15M dollars. It means that now they have total funding to near $20M (like Foursquare) and evaluation of company is $100M (similar to Foursquare). But there is a big difference between Foursquare and SCVNGR. Foursquare has more then 3-5 M users (SCVNGR less then 800K). Foursquare users is really active (SCVNGR a lot of passive observers). All of this mean that investors believe in SCVNGR and SCVNGR may be now has more profitable business model than Foursquare. We want to congrulate Seth Priebatsch and him team with this new round! In the beginning of each year all are trying to publish their predictions (we too). Here you can find 50 predictions for 2011. These guy collected predictions from different sources and include gaming as one of the trend. He expects that games will play a more important role in unexpected areas: energy efﬁciency, car fuel efﬁciency, dieting, exercise, nutrition. Also I want to add innovation in city services. We already thought about how to use Playcer platform for creating non-game and more useful quests and will go downwind! Recently I have organized CityCamp in Russia and we (concurrent with guys from CityCamp London) invented such idea:Its impossible to know how much your neighbour is doing for your street. Or how much effort you have put in in the last year compared to the this year. By turning chores into challenges, effort into visible statistics we can create a platform that celebrates achievement and makes it clear for all to see. It brings transparency and fun back into the community efforts and makes for a system that rewards the inidividual and celebrates their input in a tangable, visible way. This idea is brand new! So new infact that TED only featured it this year. During discussing project Clean city someone suggest adding game dynamics to the service to engage people share information about problems: give them points, or rewards and build rating of most active users. Clean city is the Ushahidi-based project (like Russian-fires) that collect information about problems in a city (where to need scavenge or repair or someting other).

On Nachinai event we met similar project but with clearer business model (but more amusing): Scavenge it immediately! Main idea: some people publish information where the trash and how much money they can pay. Some gives $1 or more. Who make this job (scavange) will give all money. It’s funny that all of that could be realized in Playcer. Imagine - you will have an ability to put money on your virtual account and then create a challenge (task) and an executor will earn some money granted by creator(s). Afterwards the executor can give real money! Maybe it will be in Playcer maybe not - this is not our main feature but I am sure games can make using LBS as attractive as useful.